Time Traveler – Page 3

Vernor Vinge interview and reads on Time Traveler Show

SFFaudio Online Audio
Time Traveler Show #27 Recorded live at Penguicon 6.0 on April 20th, 2008. The Time Traveler talks to Vernor Vinge about his novel Rainbows End, the Singularity, and Arthur C. Clarke. Vernor also reads his short story “A Dry Martini”.

TTS #27 –
Shownotes
MP3

There are three other recordings posted at the Time Traveler Show blog/shownotes from Penguicon 6.0:

Has Science Fiction Lost Its Mainstream Cultural Relevance?
[John Scalzi, Jeff deLuzio]
MP3

Guerrilla Marketing — The Art of Self-Promotion
[The Time Traveler, Daniel J. Hogan, Michael “Freon” Andaluz]
MP3

Podcasting
[Chris Miller, Rich Elswick, The Time Traveler, Thomas “cmdln” Gideon]
MP3

Posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show

Review of Sleeping Beauty by Ross MacDonald

Aural Noir: Review

SFFaudio Essential Sleeping Beauty
By Ross MacDonald; Performed by a Full Cast
6 Cassettes – Approx. 7 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audio Partners
Published: 1978
ISBN: 1572700491
Themes: / Mystery / Private Investigator / Dysfunctional Family / Murder / Family Secrets / Missing Person /

When Lew Archer takes home a distressed woman and she disappears with a lethal dose of his sleeping pills, he feels obligated to find her. What he finds is a past of family secrets that has lead the family into a downward spiral. Archer will have to untangle the secrets if he hopes to get the lady back alive.

After an accident from a ruptured oil well off the coast of southern California, Archer finds a beautiful lady crying with an oil-soaked seagull grasped to her breast. He takes her home and finds her disagreeable. After she leaves he notices that she had taken his bottle of prescription sleeping pills with her. Her name is Laurel Lennox Russo, and she is the granddaughter of the man who owns the offshore oil well that has ruptured, literally, in the back of his lakefront house.

This wonderful production offers a rarity in audiobooks; an unabridged full-cast recording for adults all done with impeccable direction. The director of the production and voice of Lew Archer is by Harris Yulin. He offers the right amount of concerned yet disenchantment that Archer feels. The dialogue is snappy and you can feel Archer’s presence as he interviews/interrogates this small family community. The cast, which includes Ed Asner, Richard Masur, Stacy Keech, and Veronica Cartwright, does a great job. There are over 30 people lending their voices to this audiobook.

The direction was handled deftly. The novel is in first person, and Harris Yulin voiced Lew Archer’s inner monologue close to the mike and centered in the stereo field. When Archer was talking to another character, the ambience of the setting came through and the characters were separated in the stereo field. There was also added ambience of the external sounds flowing into the scene. Exterior scenes had traffic noises, seagulls, and jets. In interior scenes you get a sense of the size of the room.

Instead of just a great audiobook, I felt I was listening to an extended, seven-hour radio play. Whether you’re a fan of Ross MacDonald or are new to his writing, this audiobook comes highly recommended.

Posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show

Orthopedic Horseshoes-Virtually a virtual mini-convention

SFFaudio Online Audio

Orthopedic Horseshoes are Herb Kauderer and Alan Katerinsky. It’s a podcast where they talk about things and talk to people, or as they say “A show where cranky old men discourse on American Society and media.” I listened to their last podcast entitled “Putting Lipstick on a Science Fiction Convention” and didn’t find them cranky at all. Here’s what it’s about:

The episode features interviews with Anne Cecil about starting a convention, renowned SF author William Tenn (Philip Klass) about Theodore Sturgeon, and Nebula-winning author Mary Turzillo about her poetry collections Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, and Dragon Soup.
Cohosts Herb & Al try to capture the flavor of a Science Fiction convention by bringing their interviews from Confluence 2008. They also discuss filking, science, socializing, the hospitality suite, “Betelgeuse Bridge,” and NESFA Press.

I can vouch for the total righteousness of William Tenn and for NESFA Press.

MP3|Podcast Feed|Site

Posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show

New Release – The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley

New Releases

The Status Civilization
By Robert Sheckley; Read by Mark Douglas Nelson
5.5 hrs. – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes

Will Barrent has no memory of the murder for which he was convicted. He will now have to live his life sentence on the prison planet Omega. The few that survive there do it by committing crimes. And the more adept the planet inmates are at higher crime, the more they climb their bizarre anti-social ladder. They all must live in a society where drug addiction is mandatory, as is the worship of the Dark One. Barrent’s goal is to find why he was sent to this mad world and to clear his name and return to Earth. But first he must survive – for a life sentence on Omega is usually a short sentence indeed.

Posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show

New Release – The Adaptive Ultimate by Stanley G. Weinbaum

New Releases

Stanley G. Weinbaum was a SF sensation when his first story, A Martian Odyssey, appeared in 1934. In less than two years though, he died of throat cancer. But he still managed to leave numerous classics and near-classics to posterity.

The Adaptive Ultimate
By Stanley G. Weinbaum; Read by Mark Douglas Nelson
1 hr. – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes

Dr. Daniel Scott, through experimentation with lab animals, has invented a serum that enables an organism to adapt itself to overcome injuries and disease. He gets his chance to try his experimental drug on a dying tubercular patient named Kyra Zelas.

Scott and his colleague, Dr. Herman Bach, are amazed when the girl recovers, but she soon begins to exhibit strange actions. Her physical appearance can change to hide her abhorrent behavior. She appears to adapt herself emotionally to save herself. But can she love?

Kyra Zelas has become the Adaptive Ultimate. How she adapts to survive may be to the detriment of the human race.

The Adaptive Ultimate originally appeared in the November 1935 issue of Astounding Stories under the pseudonym John Jessel.

Posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show

New Releases – Lovecraft, Pohl, Williamson, del Rey, Smith

New Releases

[editor’s note-A slew of releases from my audiobook company, Wonder Audio. A nice range of titles that I’m proud to present. Vintage Stories+Classic Authors+Great Narrators=Massive Goodness :) ]

Preferred Risk
By Frederik Pohl & Lester del Rey; Read by Mark Douglas Nelson
7 hrs. – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes

The Company was a powerful, efficient, and monstrous insurance organization that controlled the entire world, scientifically regulating everything in life: war, epidemics, one-a-day food pills and test-tube sex…all through the use of its patented, terrifying human deep-freeze vault.

Claims Adjuster Wills, a great believer in the Company, begins to have second thoughts when he meets beautiful and sorrowful Rena, whose radical father lies in a frozen subterranean vault.

Scanner Live in Vain
By Cordwainer Smith; Read by Jeremiah Costello
1.5 hrs. – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes

Man has conquered space, but not without costs. To maintain the space lanes, Scanners have to undergo an operation in which their brain is severed from their sensory inputs to block the Pain of Space. Martel has made this sacrifice. He must monitor his vital functions via implanted dials and instruments in his chest. His only respite from this isolated existence is his ability to occasionally “cranch” and return to some sort of normalcy with his wife, Luci. But now a man named Adam Stone has claimed that he has a found a way to travel in the deep of space without the use of the Scanners. Through the twisted logic of the community of Scanners, it is decided that Adam Stone must die. Martel, while cranched, realizes the madness of that solution and that all Scanners live in vain!

Wolves of Darkness
By Jack Williamson; Read by William Coon
3 hrs. – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes

When Clovis McLaurin receives an urgent letter from his father, Dr. Ford McLaurin, he rushes in the dead of winter to his father’s ranch. Clovis arrives to find the local townspeople being attacked and killed by a pack of wolves. As he journeys to the ranch of his father, a scientist who has been doing revolutionary experiments, he is also attacked.

But wolves are not the only thing running with the pack. Stella Jetton, the daughter of his father’s assistant, is running with the wolves, dressed in only a silk slip in the bitter cold. Clovis recognizes the blood-stained face of the girl he loves, but not her eyes. How could his father’s experiment have untapped the unimaginable horror that Clovis is about to confront?

The Colour Out of Space
by H.P. Lovecraft; read by Mark Douglas Nelson
1.5 hrs- [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes

As a man surveys the countryside for the construction of a reservoir, he comes across a stretch of barren farmland leeched of life. An aged survivor of the town tells him the tale of a rural farmer’s family and their path to madness and unspeakable horror.

Lovecraft considered “The Colour Out of Space” to be the best of all his stories. Originally appearing in the September 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, it is one of his most frequently anthologized tales.

Posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show